In Montreal, the sporting business is big business, whether you’re filling up the stands at Percival Molson, the Bell Centre, Olympic Stadium or Stade Saputo. Montrealers have a love affair with sports that seems endless and amazing in its ability to polarize the population.
“The trick is not to be a basketball team,” said a man Hamiltonians call ‘Mr. Hamilton’, which is curious, when you consider the fact a McGill phys-ed teacher, James Naismith, invented the sport.
In Montreal, the Montreal Dragons of the ill-fated NBL are a team very few remember, or care to remember. The reasons are obvious; in the Stanley Cup winning year of 1993, nobody cared about an obscure basketball team playing at Verdun Arena or anywhere else.
“Hamilton got NCAA Florida Gators star Cliff Lett who had played a bit in the NBA, there was hope the buzz would translate into more seats sold at Copps Colliseum but people didn’t care,” said a member of the Hamilton media at the time.
“Looking back on it, Sam Katz’s money managed to get Sean Gay and Jared Miller who played for the Mavericks in that league so the level wasn’t that bad, but when ex-Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien decided to bolt, it was clear the game was up.”
“Even local business man (first and last Canadian to ref in the NCAA & owner of Fox40 Whistles) Ron Foxcroft didn’t want anything to do with the Hamilton team.”
I got a hold of Foxcroft and he had this to say.
“We knew we could make money in Hamilton with basketball, but we had an incredibly good deal back in the days with Canwest, these games were broadcasted and we sold tickets, when Sam Katz approached me in ’93 to invest in the NBL. I knew Sam’s business acumen but I felt more comfortable investing in his Winnipeg team than the Hamilton team in it’s current state.”
The Montreal team folded halfway through the season, starting a long tradition of failed ventures that included the Montreal Royal, Matrix and of course my favorite, the idiotically named Montreal Sasquatch which had as much in common with Quebecois mystique as a game of squash.
For a brief moment though, the Dragons held a tad of relevance when Atlanta Hawks first round draft pick and Iowa legend, Roy Marble decided to grace NBL grounds. Marble had been controversially suspended his rookie year by league counsel and now NHL commissioner Gary Bettman when he failed a league-imposed random substance test.
Some say that the suspension infuriated Hawks owner and media mogul Ted Turner so bad that Gary Bettman’s once promising future in the NBA was now compromised. But in typical Ted Turner fashion, that didn’t seem to stop him from paying Bettman millions to bring the Atlanta Thrashers in town once the opportunity arose.
To understand Ted Turner’s personality when it comes to investmenst, the Family Guy episode (Screwed the Pooch) where Ted Turner turns to Peter Griffin after losing a hand of poker and says:
- You sold me out, I could use a man like you, how does a million a year sound? You disgust me. Get out of my face.
It isn’t that far from the truth.
Marble’s Wikipedia page and NBL stats give him rookie of the year credit with the Montreal Dragons, but seldom could I find a single reference to him ever playing a game in Montreal; not even ex-Dragon Dwight Walton seemed to have a clue.
“Wow! Now that’s a name from the past. I don’t think he played in Montreal. At least not when I played for them.”
Marble won the ’93 Rookie of the year award in the NBL in 1993, right before the league folded due to poor finances and an inability to gather any interest.
When I got a hold of Marble, he mentioned the Saskatoon Slam and couldn’t for the life of him remember ever even being in Montreal but seemed to vaguely recollect the NBL in general.
Ted Turner couldn’t be reached to comment (which I thought was a tad unrealistic to begin with) as I wanted some feedback on his decision to get an NHL franchise in Atlanta and the Roy Marble story, but Foxcroft, who currently works for the NBA, gave me incredible insight on the ’93 NBL and the more I spoke to him, the more I started realizing, had Bettman stayed in the NBA, I doubt the NHL would have ever expanded to Atlanta, but Turner hadn’t forgotten that Bettman stood up to him when it came time to suspend the highly touted Marble.
“Don’t forget how big a TV market Atlanta was in the NBA, those late 80s teams were among the best ever,” said Foxcroft.
A year and a half later, NBA commissioner David Stern granted two expansion franchises to the NBA in Canada, one in Toronto and the other in Vancouver.
“Tit for tat,” ESPN said at the time, but it got me thinking, if it wasn’t for the Roy Marble suspension would there ever have been hockey in Atlanta or basketball in Toronto? Think about it.
Like a Winnipeg journalist put it when I ran the article past him: “If I’m reading this correctly, had Roy Marble not done coke in the late ‘80s, we wouldn’t have had a team to move to Winnipeg, we wouldn’t have hockey in Winnipeg?”
To put a long story short, pretty much.
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